A heretical question about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood: Is Daniel Plainview a good person?
The inquiry is an overstatement, because the answer is obvious: Of course not.
But contrary to the assessments of many critics, I don’t think Plainview is evil, and more than that I’m not convinced he’s much different from most of us.
Plus: Michael Clayton.
This is what customer service is all about.
Seven hours after voting closed, we’ve published the Drunken Commentary Track for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia — and the movie’s three hours long.
In reality, the gestation period of this commentary track was seven years. The movie has been digested slowly, primarily with “Magnolia and Meaning” and then through an eight-hour class I led.
Further exploration took place with the essays “Why Are There Frogs Falling from the Sky?” and “The Blossom: Jim Kurring.”
Magnolia continues to surprise me, and my feelings and thoughts on it are still evolving. It’s not done with me yet.
The first images of Jim Kurring involve his morning routine, and it’s nothing remarkable: He eats, he showers, he reads the paper, he exercises.
But there are little hints about how we’re supposed to react to him. He laughs out loud — and not very convincingly — at something on the Today show. When he’s lifting weights, we see one of those inspirational posters encouraging “determination.” And he prays, on his knees at the foot of his bed, with a cross looking down upon him. When he finishes, he gets up and claps his hands together once, as if Team God had just broken from the huddle. We learn through voice-over that he participates in some dating service, or at the least runs a personal ad. He’s a cop, and he gives himself a pep talk in the squad car.
Why does nobody take the frogs seriously? Why does nobody question them?
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, the cataclysmic, apocalyptic rain of frogs seems — outside of this essay’s titular question, posed in the movie by nurse Phil Parma — casually accepted. Nobody else says: “That’s some fucked-up shit, those frogs.”
And I guess it’s a testament to Anderson’s script, direction, tone, pacing, and heavy foreshadowing that I’ve never heard anybody say anything along the lines of: “You know, I was with it right up until the frogs.” I led a small-group discussion on the movie last year, and nobody had any problem with the amphibians, and nobody ascribed a grand meaning to them. As Stanley Spector says in the library, with wide eyes but no curiosity: “This happens. This is something that happens.”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love is not bad, exactly, just anxious and annoying and perfectly framed and puzzling. It does make a certain amount of sense, though, if you look at from my skewed perspective.
Magnolia breaks through the self-aware emotional vacancy of the decade’s cool movies (both sterile and knowingly clever, epitomized by Quentin Tarantino) without losing its edge; it gets inside its characters’ minds and hearts with dazzling style. It is afraid of neither elaborate tracking shots nor a good, fairly won cry.
That's Just Nitpicking, Isn't It?